Empire – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Man combing Vietnamese pot-bellied pig in Cuenca courtyard

Or perhaps it isn’t.

Roddy Doyle’s niggers of Europe explained

Don’t claim national origins for yourselves without very carefully considering the possible consequences.

The universality of bu/bo/boo

The strange shrieks of theatrical monsters often don’t require translation.

Spain, a nation of whores, soldiers and fools?

Spanish entries from the 1811 Dictionary of the vulgar tongue, with some fanciful etymological speculation and a mercifully brief bout of bar-room anthropology.

Go forth and multiply

Witness accounts from the records of the Spanish Inquisition in Córdoba.

A league and a turd/Legua y mierda

Minsheu’s Pleasant and Delightfull Dialogues: where did he get all that horseshit?

Star Trek, the origins

Kalebeul’s investigation into Vosk and the Na’kuhl temporal conduit yields some surprising results.

Pleased to see that the marvellous Baldus–a vague subterranean source of inspiration for the world’s wildest walking wisness–is getting a wider hairing. I’ve read chunks of the French translation and am looking forward to the English.

How singing can save your life

César-Javier Palacios reports on the cyclist, shot dead by a hunter who mistook him for a boar. When in death’s dark vale loud singing usually suffices to drive off hell’s hunters. Hunters know this too. In his romance, Count Arnaldos, hungry hawk in hand, falls prey to a sailor (love, glory or death, true or…

Recession rations

Debating at lunch how long it would be before we’re all eating grass soup (sopa de golf on the costas), we progressed to the devil’s cookbook, and someone mentioned the 16th century colonial chronicler, Bernardino de Sahagún. Back when Bernardino was booking the cooks Mictlan was where dead Aztecs lived–way up north, probably in New…

Category: Empire